Oleanna (1994)
A deeply intimate, conversational, quiet movie with "serious" intentions. It means to say something about fidelity and love and a common situation of an awkward attraction between two people.
And I found it stilted and false. It depended most of all on a kind of believability. This is about a professor (male) and his student (female). You know what happens next, sort of. Except that it doesn't quite become emotionally interesting. It's not just people spilling their interiors--it's a lot of talk, and so therefore a lot of thoughts in words. Which is very different than emotional conflict.
It depends enormously on the writing, which is just forced and wrong. The acting is fine, but as stiff at times as the writing. It may not matter but I'm a professor and I found it all improbable. It's almost like it was written by someone who didn't know this world, and yet the stiffness of it makes it seem professorial. (The writer, for the record, is not a professor.)
The professor in the movie is played by William Macy and he's not terrible (he's the familiar character he plays so well). The student is more awful, really, played by Debra Eisenstadt. But then, I'm not sure anyone can play (act) these lines with conviction. So we turn to David Mamet, one of the great lionized playwrights of our time, and a writer with a stunningly uneven career. I love his best work. I'm not sure what the point here was. It's arrogant and affected and boring capital B.
A deeply intimate, conversational, quiet movie with "serious" intentions. It means to say something about fidelity and love and a common situation of an awkward attraction between two people.
And I found it stilted and false. It depended most of all on a kind of believability. This is about a professor (male) and his student (female). You know what happens next, sort of. Except that it doesn't quite become emotionally interesting. It's not just people spilling their interiors--it's a lot of talk, and so therefore a lot of thoughts in words. Which is very different than emotional conflict.
It depends enormously on the writing, which is just forced and wrong. The acting is fine, but as stiff at times as the writing. It may not matter but I'm a professor and I found it all improbable. It's almost like it was written by someone who didn't know this world, and yet the stiffness of it makes it seem professorial. (The writer, for the record, is not a professor.)
The professor in the movie is played by William Macy and he's not terrible (he's the familiar character he plays so well). The student is more awful, really, played by Debra Eisenstadt. But then, I'm not sure anyone can play (act) these lines with conviction. So we turn to David Mamet, one of the great lionized playwrights of our time, and a writer with a stunningly uneven career. I love his best work. I'm not sure what the point here was. It's arrogant and affected and boring capital B.